The Problem

As our organisational structure becomes a little more clear going forward, it’s obvious that we’re going to be relying fairly heavily on bounties for help with technical development. Currently, no-one really owns this process, and it seems that teams don’t like the idea of managing it themselves (nor is Gitcoin etc. really set up for multi-person management of bounties yet).

A Solution, Version 0.1

We delegate a bit of decision-making power down to teams, but have one or two people oversee the whole flow so that we can track expenses and success rate per team and across the whole organisation. So, this will be the new process:

Each team is responsible for labelling the issues they want bountied with a bounty-awaiting-approval label and a size label. This size refers to amount of hours the team feels it will take to solve. You can find a spreadsheet with exact sizes here.

You used to need 2 developer votes. Now, this doesn’t matter. Use whatever metrics work best for your team. When you are happy the issue is ready for bounty, simply move it into the appropriate column in our Project Board, which is split up by team, and it will get a bounty put on it. We will check the board daily, you only need to ping us if it is truly urgent.

Jason, Hutch or I will then create the bounty through Gitcoin and assign the funds based on the size of the issue and move it to the “Open” column for your team.

Workers then apply through Gitcoin. We’ll try filter these for you (and sometimes just reject/accept based on our own experience). However, occasionally we’ll need to contact you to see if you’re happy with the applicant. We then approve the worker through the Gitcoin interface.

We’ll get notified via email when work is submitted, and move the issue to the appropriate column on the board. Developers or testers need to handle their own issues and reviews, but you can look in the “Submitted” column for your team to catch up easily on any you still need to review.

Once merged and closed, we move it into that column.

So, ideally, we’ll be able to track how much each team spends per month on bounties, how much the org spends on bounties, and how much of that spend is actually picked up and used to solve issues by the community.

Some notes: you’ll see that Embark is not in the board, because their repos are outside of the Status ones. We’ll have to have a separate board for them, because they also definitely need bounties.